A Day Late and A Dollar Short
Part III: From Glamour To Grammar




From, Wit of the Staircase, May 10, 2007

But Stardom was made a year after THOG. Still, the themes are similar. Girl from the sticks (in THOG's case Antler, Ohio, though neither Grace Greenberg the editor of her chronicling fashion magazine Ooh La La nor her agent Alphonse Harlan, can remember where she's from) stumbles into fame that she at first enjoys but--as seldom occurs in reality--she rejects the trappings. Well, in Charles' case, she "goes into seclusion" after staging a gothic fashion show case death ritual with her fashion designer friends, Osage and Orange. In Stardom, Tina marries a physician whose demanding career prevents him from giving her any affection.

One becomes isolated by choice, the other by a poor choice in husband.



Duncan was aware, too of director William Klein's antic and absurd 1965 satiric "mockumentary" about high fashion, Where Are You Polly Maggoo? This was the single film made by Twiggy-esque model Dorothy McGowan. The story behind the story is that McGowan made "Polly" then quit public life for good. See a bit of it on Sundance's site --which is where the elbow raised image of Polly is from.

The most striking and bizarre scene in the Duncan-Blake film -- given subsequent events-- is a funereal fashion show. One thinks of Duncan's "Los Angeles Lunar Society" and its full moon rituals and the memorial service for fake novelist JT Leroy, and the strange demise of both Duncan and Blake.

The Osage and Orange event features models in grim high fashion wearing jewelry with wordsLEFT and GONE (also references to the "dead" Charles Valentine's music). Charles herself is laid out in an open casket--much as Duncan herself.

An unseen male questioner--like the reporter in Citizen Kane--asks Grace Greenberg, "But didn't she have problems in New York?" And she replies, "Well, we're all allowed to indulge ourselves, aren't we?" This includes swilling Chanel No.5 "on the rocks" at hip night spots. (Given that Duncan's decease first got into the Interwebs via a perfume blog...well.)

And, in similar fashion, Grace Greenberg says with enthusiasm, "Charles was like a beacon! When she was in a good mood, it was like being by the Hope diamond!" Otherwise, Charles could be at best aloof or at worst a pyromaniac. The film implies that when Charles gets tired of a difficult situation, she burns it down--as happens with her family's cosmetology salon and the headquarters of Ooh La La.

I am reminded of anonymous critics of Duncan who claimed she was like a "bright and polished apple with a rotten core" (LAist, Aug. 4, 2007); "Beauty. Brains. Bonkers." (SoMA: Society of Mutual Autopsy, Aug.2,2007), and a July 28,2007 post on BLDBLOG that described Duncan as a "paranoid schizophrenic who went out of her way to be very insulting to a lot of people. Her suicide just seems like one final selfish gesture, especially since her being "at peace" with the decision did not diminish the huge impact this act had on the lives of her loved ones."

Likewise, ardent and grieving defender Mike Payne wrote in DreamsEnd on August 10, and a similar entry on August 4 on the Laist blog, "She was righteously capable of lording over one. The namesake of her blog-didn’t really apply to her-of course she would think of things to say later-no she’d probably be asleep-because she would have already blown everyone away with her quick tongue. She cracked me up so fast I can’t remember what she said-she was that quick."

Charles Valentine dreams of leaving Antler. She lays in the grass with her friend Sarah Barnicle and imagines how the clouds resemble famous people, like those she read of in New York or London, who may have been real, or, as Barnicle recalls, "made up." If this was just a movie and not, also, a person's life, we'd call this foreshadowing, considering accusations both pre-and most belligerent post-mortem, that Duncan's relationship with objective truth was, at best, a creative one.

Charles Valentine achieves a level of pop icon status that Theresa Duncan didn't. Artist Jeremy Blake, her partner of a dozen years, is commemorated now in museums. He's regarded--at this early juncture--as a pioneer in new media art. As artist friends discussed over the Thanksgiving table yesterday, we won't know in our life time what art is in fact the Great Work of our time. We are too close to have the understanding perspective affords.

For a recent musing on the joining of the two, and a semi-hemi-demi recap of the late and unfortunate events, see the appropriate named Memoirs on A Rainy Day.

"They were like two weird people from a circus or something," says Loren Valentine, Charles' brother about his sister's first boy friend Lyle Borkan. Together, they start a music club in a bathroom stall of Antler, Ohio's only night club where Lyle whispers the lyrics of his songs into the ears of adoring girls while Charles strums her guitar. "I sold your love for $1.50," is such a line. Lyle's unfaithfulness--it is implied--and the crushing lack of imagination in Antler leads Charles to seek a way out--by hitching.

She juts out her thumb by the gas station with a sign around her neck proclaiming, "Wherever" and arrives in New York City via a family from St. Louis. She sees the skyline for the first time and in her minds's eye--and an image made jarring by intervening events-- the World Trade Center towers turn into surreal fingers adorned by fire engine red nails.

At the conclusion of this animated female bildungsroman, Charles has rejected the trappings of fame and is living in a shack in Antler, smoking, drinking, and trying to write the demons out of her while her janitor brother (who resembles a hick version of Jeremy Blake) dozes on the front porch.

Charles Valentine made a transition from glamour girl to grammar girl, as Duncan has her say. Charles' creator has in a way achieved these two titles--but she extinguished herself in the process, and the grief of her loss caused Jeremy Blake to walk into the surf off the Far Rockaway beach.



Theresa Duncan, Wit of the Staircase, July 8, 2005.

A Day Late and A Dollar Short Part II
"They came to watch me disappear"

[Via: The Wit of the Staircase, August 2, 2006.]


[A version of events, as collected here, for those members of the billion-eyed audience who aren't following along, as the Rev. R. Stuart Carlton used say at Stockton Memorial Baptist, in their hymnals.]

I sat down during this holiday to watch the 1999 animated film short The History of Glamour by Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake, with additional assistance by Karen Kilimnik both this summer by predicament translated into idea and metaphor. The animated short--and such deceptive simple creations require many handmaidens--included the efforts of Eric Dyer, David Oppenheim, and Fugazi Brendan Canty, DJ Kasmir, Bikini Kill Kathy Wilcox, Clifford Le Cloyer, and, credited for the opening credits that explode and double expose in Blake-ian fashion, Matt Berninger, who must've handled some of the music.

To follow what our cosmologist Mr. Davies observed above, the past undergoes alteration as we revise our understanding of the present. Sort of like the view from a mountainside with the use of a binoculars; the further way you are, the more you can see, but without aide, you cannot glean the details. The History of Glamour seems prescient, but how is that possible since the film was produced in 1999? A self-fulfilling prophecy?

In one respect, the through line off THOG reminded me of a guilty pleasure of mine, Stardom featuring Jessica Paré.


This, too, is a mockumentary. The protagonist here is a Canadian woman hockey player who is spotted by a sleazy photography and one thing leads to another and she's celebretized as a fashion model. The benefits and deficits of the limelight life are encapsulated, but my favorite parts are when Paré's Tina Menzhal uses her hockey battle training to take down annoying paparazzi and men who become abusive.



Duncan's singer-songwriting protagonist is given the androgynous name of Charles Valentine. She doesn't have hockey skills, but other idiosyncratic behaviors.

She stages an art provocation by crashing a performance art piece by Alicia Boobcraft (see Vanessa Beecroft) at the Googenheim Museum. Past a line of "serious intellectuals" there are dozen women, naked, or wearing "cootchie bikinis" standing "still and tall. Lovely art workers swaying."

Charles decides a missing element is her. Her clothing designer friends, Osage and Orange, rush the arts provacateur to their studio, put her in a tiny bikini, outfit her with teetering high heels and an aluminum baseball bat. She returns to the Googenheim and with her trusty metal slugger proceeds in her anarchic way to shatter the high church of art. Thus, she critiques what is supposed to be shocking by throwing a punk act of hooliganism into the works.

Life in a way imitated art during a 2005 Beecroft exhibition in Berlin; except there, audience members trying to get closer to the poker-faced participants instead scuffled with police. Thus, the static performance was interrupted by reactions to action.

Charles becomes the prettiest resident ever of the city jail and this is the scene depicted in the textbook illustration at the top of this post; a sensual, languorous Charles lounging on her bunk.

A Day Late and A Dollar Short
Part I
Spooky Action

Anthropomorphic Chest of Drawers, Salvador Dalí

This is "Science Friday" on NPR's Talk of the Nation and Ira Flatow is talking to author Alan Weisman whose "The World Without Us" analyzes the ultimate deterioration of human-made objects, from the Panama Canal to the New York City subway system and the Pyramids, if maintenance stopped. And what is the expected of the continuing existence of such detritus as plastic

The following guest is the cosmologist--what a job title!--Paul Davies, discussing a subject dear to my hear, that is the multiverse theory of physics, or, cosmology/metaphysics. His assessment in his The Cosmic Jackpot is that the Universe has engineered its own self-awareness. Mind an Life are fundamental particles in Creation. Life and and the Universe that brought it into being are part of a explanatory statement. The Universe is a great cosmic computer, and thought its software -- didn't we get this with The Hitch-hiker's Guide To The Galaxy?

He also states with great emphasis that you can't travel back in time or send information through time. Humph. Near as I know, that's all still a theory. See Paul J. Nahin's Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science Fiction, Second Edition.

Davies says mind and Universe will at some point in the future merge. What we do today, what human beings choose to measure, what gets measured today effects what happens in the distant past -- sounds weird but weird things happen in quantum physics.

Reality is an amalgam of histories of the past, thus, what we study today, affects the past. Mind/Universe is in a constant process self-revelation--computing itself; refining and polishing. Davies isn't partial to the idea that life was imprinted from outside. The Universe generated Mind. It's always thinking about...itself. What happens when Deep Thought reaches a conclusion?

Spooky Action

All this taken into consideration, I've now experienced Theresa Duncan's History of Glamour, and I'll be writing here about that piece and the current Corocran exhibition of Jeremy Blake's Wild Choir.

Those of the billion-eyed audience who've been following the general train of thought at the Blue Raccoon may have noticed an interest in the suicide deaths of writer/bloggist Theresa Duncan and new media artist Jeremy Blake. Or rather, the reaction to their deaths in the blogosphere.

Now that I've viewed THoG within close proximity to Blake's works, I'm girding to give my views on both. Should anyone care.

There's been a slight uptick on the Duncan-Blake interest meter due to the Corcoran exhibit and one also presented in memoriam at the Kinz, Tillou + Feigen gallery that represented him. The negativity expressed by some trollers also remains: at Gothamist, the Nov. 16 announcement of the Blake show drew two unfeeling remarks, one from Reality Czech: "How to become a famous artist: kill yourself," and ihatellbrokers offered, "not missing you two twits at all! boo hoo hoo!"

But, and here is where the dedicated "Duncanologists" will point and laugh at me; I didn't realize until a few days ago that "The Wit" left a message from the grave. Or did she?

In February 2007, her scan of a New York Times blog by none other than Dick Cavett turned up a story about Basil Rathbone and a communication pertaining to an acquaintance killed in an automobile accident. Verifying this urban myth-esque story would require time, an expense account, and knowledge of how to track down mouldering LAPD files, hospital and morgue records, or hunting through obituaries. Finding the truth would either enhance or diminish Mr. Cavett's good story.

I love me some Dick Cavett, and, well, Theresa Duncan, too--as I Drop Names in the way only the D.C. could (because he met these people--I didn't)--but facts is fact, Basil Rathbone, or not. This accident left a paper trail--if it happened.

So, here we are with a Rigged To Explode On Halloween note from T.D.

Now. One wonders: when and under what circumstances may she have concocted leaving this message -- and the one to come on New Year's Eve?

As our great Mr. Davies might agree: the past changes as we come to greater understanding of the present.